The Polish resistance, through a boy's eyes

Bohdan Chester Hryniewicz lives now in a comfortable, light-filled condominium overlooking Sarasota's Bayfront, its wooden floors gleaming and its walls hung with original art. He shares the space with his second wife, Anne, and their Rhodesian ridgeback, Shika.

One room in the condo is the library, its shelves filled with books on history and politics, its walls hung with maps and photographs. Much of it is documentation to support Hryniewicz's first book, "My Boyhood War: Warsaw 1944.," published recently by Spellmount, an imprint of The History Press in England.

Hryniewicz was just eight years old when Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, starting World War II. Living with his family in Wilno (Vilnius), Hryniewicz found the invasion of his home city by Russian tanks more exciting than threatening.

By the time Poland's capital city, Warsaw came under siege in 1944, the glamour of the war may have worn off, but not the energy and excitement. Hryniewicz, at just 14 years old, was part of the Polish Underground, "lightly armed, irregular forces" doing battle with "the most experienced, well-equipped army of the day."

Bohdan Chester Hryniewicz / HERALD-TRIBUNE PHOTO BY NICK ADAMS

Over the 63 days of the Warsaw uprising, the city was destroyed; more than 200,000 Poles were killed. "The impact on Polish society and potential, from the loss of its best and brightest, can never be assessed," Hryniewicz writes in the author's note of his book.

Hryniewicz, who fled Poland in 1947 and emigrated to the United States in 1950, where he studied engineering at the Newark College of Engineering and then M.I.T., built a career in engineering and later in hotel development in Puerto Rico, had "never written anything except some technical manuals" until his children began pestering him to write his memoirs.

"About 12 years ago I was with my daughter and she said, 'Dad, you've got nothing to do, just write it,'" said Hryniewicz, 84. His daughter submitted the manuscript to The History Press, which "jumped on it immediately," although the publisher was interested only in the war years, and wanted Hryniewicz to keep the manuscript to 75,000 words. An author's note and epilogue serve to round out elements of Hryniewicz's life after the Warsaw Uprising.

The uprising was "the largest urban battle of the second world war," with "indiscriminate killing of men, women and children," said Hryniewicz, "63, 64 days. It's never been spoken about since the fall of communism. "The Germans didn't want to talk about it, the Russians didn't want to talk about it, the Allies didn't want to talk about it – first of all, they'd sold Poland down the river."

Hryniewicz's book is filled with an impressive level of detail, and while he naturally had to do significant research for the big-picture events of the war and the Warsaw Uprising, his personal memories are as fresh as they were when he was a boy.

Family photographs and toy cannons on a shelf in Chester Hryniewicz's library. / HERALD-TRIBUNE PHOTO BY NICK ADAMS

"You know, I can close my eyes, remember those scenes," he said, his eyes filling with tears. "I was trying to write in the eyes of who I was at the time, what I saw and went through."

The early years of the war read more like a boy's adventure story than a war memoir.

"It never occurred to me that something would ever happen to me," said Hryniewicz, even though the 200-person resistance unit he belonged to lost 50 of its fighters in a single 10 day period.

"I come from a family very involved in the struggle for Polish independence for several generations. "Every single male member of my family was in the Polish army. I grew up in that spirit. All I wanted to be was an officer in the Polish army."

He began writing the book in longhand ("I do not type," he said.) and when that got too laborious, he hired a couple of students from New College of Florida to take dictation.

"I think it's a story which really should be told," said Hryniewicz, who keeps a close eye on events and politics in central Europe.

"What happened in Warsaw 70 years ago is raising its ugly head again with (Russian president Vladimir) Putin," he said.

Susan Rife

Susan Rife is the arts and books editor for the Herald-Tribune Media Group. She holds a bachelor of science degree in journalism from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She can be reached by email or call (941) 361-4930.
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Last modified: October 16, 2015
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